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CaroBainbridge
CaroBainbridge
A 'People's Princess'? part 1
Mar 25 2009, 4:58 PM EDT | Post edited: Mar 25 2009, 4:58 PM EDT
Unsurprisingly, since Goody’s death, intellectual and popular comparisons between Jade Goody and Princess Diana are now being made, not least by Goody’s own mother who simply stated, ‘It’s like Diana, isn’t it?’ on seeing the flowers and tributes outside Jade’s former home, (http://www.metro.co.uk). Talking heads also made this comparison on 23rd March on Today, and Women’s Hour on BBC Radio 4. Goody really is not the people’s princess, of course, no more in death than in life, but one can chart a transformation in our culture from identifying with extraordinary stars to ordinary made popular celebrities, beginning with Diana who traversed both these types. The extraordinary levels of splitting going on around Goody are also significant here. It’s not so very long since she was being roundly demonised in the both the popular imagination and the popular press as a figure who embodied the very worst aspects of a society that has apparently lost all notions of respect – allegations of racism in the Celebrity Big Brother house led to myriad scenes of remorse and regret on Jade’s part, culminating in her decision to appear on India’s Big Boss as a means of doing public penance and demonstrating the emotional journey of the maturational processes that have seemingly marked out Jade’s ‘celebrity’ life. The irony of all of this, of course, is that this was also the very moment when Jade learnt of her illness and emerged into the torrid whirlwind that surrounded her terminal decline in recent months. It strikes me that in this period, the public responses to Goody’s decline have been steeped in references to the maternal. This has enabled not merely her restoration to the status of a ‘good enough’ celebrity but also surely fuels the extent of her sanctification following on from her death a few days ago. So what is at stake here? Do you find this valuable?    
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CaroBainbridge
CaroBainbridge
1. A 'People's Princess'? cont'd
Mar 25 2009, 4:59 PM EDT | Post edited: Mar 25 2009, 4:59 PM EDT
The interrelation of femininity, the maternal and the emotional seems significant, but this is nothing particularly new. Instead the endless vacillation between Jade as a good object and Goody as a bad one effectively underscores the extent of our hunger for models of coping in an increasingly narcissistic cultural setting. Perhaps this was marked out in the incident mentioned above in the original ‘Notes from the Couch’ column. When I heard a radio 4 news bulletin announce the fact that a woman armed with a hammer had hovered by night over Jade whilst she was resting in the hospice, I could not help thinking that here was a form of projected (illicit) fantasy. The blanket coverage of Jade’s demise has (like that in response to the death of Diana twelve years ago) elicited a great deal of ill feeling as well as sympathy among the population at large. The paucity of opportunity to express one’s dismay at assumptions that public mourning was necessary or desireable in this case signals the extent to which the mediatisation of emotion has become rather hysterical. Again, I find myself thinking of metaphors anchored in gender and wonder what would happen if the celebrity in question were not female and whether this is a valid question to ask when thinking about emotionality at all. Do you find this valuable?